Matt Ridley on the crucial importance of coal to the Industrial Revolution

George P.Landow, Professor of English and Art History Emeritus, Brown University

In his study of how prosperity develops in various cultures, Matt Ridley points to the crucial role coal played in England's industrial development. Not only did this source of energy exist but it existed in convenient locations. Most of the conditions for an industrial revolution were already in place, he admits, but

now imagine
what would have happened next if Britain had possessed no
accessible coal reserves. Coal exists all over the world, but some
British coal fields were close to the surface and close enough to
navigable waterways to be cheaply transported. The cost of
transporting coal overland was prohibitive until the railway
came along. It was not that coal was a cheaper source of power
than the alternative — coal took a century to compete on price
with water power in factories — but that it was effectively
limitless in supply. The harnessing of water power soon experienced
diminishing returns as it reached saturation point in the
Pennines. Nor was there any other, renewable fuel that could
supply the need. In the first half of the eighteenth century, even
the relatively tiny English iron industry was close to moribund
for lack of charcoal fuel on a largely deforested island. What
timber there was in the south of England was in demand for ship
building, which bid up its price. So in search of charcoal to feed
their forges, the iron masters left the Sussex Weald and moved
to the West Midlands, then to the Welsh Marches, to South
Yorkshire and eventually to Cumberland. Imports of wrought
iron from well-forested Sweden and Russia met the growing
demand from the mechanisation of the textile industry, but even
these imports could not meet the needs of the industrial
revolution. Only coal could do that. There was never going to be
enough wind, water or wood in England to power the factories,
let alone in the right place.

"This was the position in which China found itself" in 1700, he argues, pointing out that the Chinese certainly long had the scientific and technological expertise the British did. But they did not have such convenient sources of coal.

One of Ridley's most contrarian arguments about the relation of prosperity to coal — one that goes against much twenty-first century thinking about new sources of energy — is that industrial development and consequent prosperity required abandoning so-called renewable energy sources, since they both proved inadequate and they devastated the environment. Citing the amount of energy sources needed to power horses (that is, food), he claims that one third of arable land in the U. K. was used to grow food for them, land that could otherwise be used to grow food.